


Incoming Tide

by reylomami



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, Childhood Memories, DysFUNctional families, F/M, Miscarriages, Modern AU, Olive Kitteridge AU, Suicide Attempts, hidden mannerisms, memory walk, mental health topics, old town, rey and ben sorta remember each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-17 01:03:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20612357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reylomami/pseuds/reylomami
Summary: Kylo comes back to his old town to end his brokenness once and for all. The bay is beautiful and the cold, sharp waters look inviting.





	Incoming Tide

**Author's Note:**

> I DO NOT OWN ANY OF THIS.
> 
> This is purely adapted from Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteridge", from a chapter called 'Incoming Tide'.
> 
> I liked the characters so much and the hidden stories behind them were so compelling that I knew it could be adapted into Reylo. Might expand on this if it works out.

The bay had small whitecaps and the tide was coming in, so the smaller rocks could be heard moving as the water shifted the. Also there was the twanging sound of the cables hitting the masts of the sailboats moored. A few seagulls gave squawking cries as they dove down to pick up the fish heads and tails and shining insides that the boy was tossing from the dock as he cleaned the mackerel. All this Ben saw as he sat in his car with the windows partly open. The car was parked on the grassy area, not far from the marina. Two trucks were parked farther over, on the gravel by the dock.

How much time went by, Kylo didn’t know.

At one point, the marina’s screen door opened wheezily and slammed shut, and Kylo watched as a man moved in slow steps in his dark rubber boots, tossing a coil of heavy rope into the back of the truck. If the man had noticed Kylo, he gave no sign, even when he backed up his truck and turned his head in Kylo’s direction. There was no reason they would recognize each other. Kylo had not been to this town since he was a child; thirteen, when he moved away with his uncle. He was as much a stranger up here now as any tourist might be, and yet gazing back at the sun-sliced bay, he noted how familiar it felt; he had not expected that. The salt air filled his nose, the wild rugosa bushes with their white blossoms brought him a vague confusion; a sense of sad ignorance seemed cloaked in their benign white petals.

Rey Jones poured coffee into two white mugs, placed them on the counter, said quietly, “You’re _wel_come,” and moved back to arrange the corn muffins that had just been passed through the opening from the kitchen. She had seen the man sitting in the car – he’d been there well over an hour – but people did that sometimes, drove out from town just to gaze at the water. Still, there was something about him that was troubling her. “They’re perfect,” she said to the cook, because the tops of the muffins were crispy at the edges, yellow as rising suns. The fact that their newly baked scent did not touch off a queasiness in her, as they had two times in the past year, made her sad; a soft dismalness settled over her. The doctor had said to them, _For three months you are not to even think of it_.

The screen door opened, banged shut. Through the large window, Rey saw that the man in the car still sat looking at the water, and as Rey poured coffee for an elderly couple that had seated themselves slowly into a booth, as she asked how they were this nice morning, she suddenly knew who the man was, and something passed over her, like a shadow crossing in front of the sun. “There you go,” she said to the couple, and didn’t glance out the window again.

“Say, why doesn’t Ben come over here instead,” Old Kenobi had suggested, when Rey had been so small her head had only reached the kitchen counter, shaking it _No, no, no_, she didn’t want to go there. She’d been scared of him; in kindergarten he had sucked on his wrist so hard it was always a brilliant disk of a bruise, and his mother – regal in posture, dark-haired, husky-voiced – had scared her, too. Townsfolk used to refer to her as Princess Leia for reasons unknown to little Rey. Now, as she put the corn muffins onto a plate, she thought that Old Kenobi’s response had been graceful, brilliant almost. Ben had come to her house instead, and he’d patiently swung a jump rope whose other end was tied around a tree, while Rey had jumped and jumped. On her way home from work today, Rey would stop by Old Kenobi’s house. You’ll never guess who I saw, she would say.

The boy on the dock stood up, holding a yellow pail in one hand, a knife in the other. A seagull swooped in and the boy waved his arm with the knife. Kylo watched as the boy turned to come up the ramp, but a man was sauntering down onto the wharf. “Son, put the knife in the pail,” the man called out, and the boy did that, carefully, and then grabbed the rail and climbed up the ramp to meet his father. He was still young enough that he took the man’s hand. Together they peered into the pail, and then they got into the truck and drove off.

Kylo, watching all this from his car, thought, _Good_, and what he meant as that he had felt no emotion watching this, the man and the son.

“A lot of people don’t have families,” Dr. Snoke had said, scratching his paper-thin skin then unabashedly brushing away anything that had fallen onto his chest. “But they still have homes.” Folding his hands, calmly, across his stomach.

On his way here to the marina, Kylo had driven past his childhood home. Back when he responded to the name ‘Ben’. The road was still dirt, with deep ruts, but there were a few new homes tucked back into the woods. Tree trunks should have doubled in girth, and perhaps they had, but the woods remained as he remembered them, thick and tangled and rough, an uneven patch of sky showing through as he turned up the hill to where his house was. It was the shed that made him certain he’d not taken a wrong turn – the deep red shed beside the house, and right next to that, the granite rock that had been large enough that Ben used to think of it as a mountain, as he climbed it in his little-boy sneakers. The rock was still there – and the house, but it had been renovated; a wraparound front porch added, and the old kitchen gone. Of course: they’d have wanted the kitchen gone. A sense of umbrage pricked him, then left. He slowed the car, peering carefully for any signs of children. He saw no bicycles, no swing set, no tree house, no basketball hoop – just a hanging pink impatiens plant by the front door.

Relief came, arriving as a sensation beneath his ribs, like a gentle lapping of the water’s edge at low tide, a comforting quiescence. In the back of the car was a blanket, and he would still use it, even if there were no children in the house. Right now the blanket was wrapped around the rifle, but when he returned  
(soon, while this relief still touched, quietly, the inner blankness he had felt on the long ride up), he would lie down on the pine needles and put the blanket over him. If it was the man of the house who had found him – so what? The woman who had hung the pink impatiens? She wouldn’t look for long. But to have a child – no, Kylo could not abide the thought of any child discovering what he had discovered; that his mother’s need to devour her life had been so huge and urgent as to spray remnants of corporeality across the kitchen cupboards. Never mind, his mind said to him quietly, as he drove on past. Never mind. The woods were there, and that’s all he wanted, to lie on the pine needles, touch the thin, ripping bark of a cedar tree, have the hackmatack needles above his head, the wild lilies of the valley with their green, open leaves near him. The hidden white starflowers, the wild violets; his mother had shown him all these.

The extra noise of the clanking sailboat masts made him realise the wind had picked up. The seagulls had stopped their squawking now that the fish entrails were gone. A fat gull that had been standing on the rail of the ramp not far from him took off – its wings flapping only twice before the breeze carried it along. Hollow-boned; Ben had seen gull bones as a child. He had shouted with panic when the small girl who lived with Old Kenobi (no, they said she wasn’t his granddaughter) had collected some to take back to the house. Leave them where they are, Ben had shouted.

“States and traits,” Dr Snoke had said. “Traits don’t change, states of mind do.”

Two cars drove in and parked near the marina. He hadn’t thought that there would be so much activity here on a weekday, but it was almost July, and people had their boats to sail; he watched a couple, not much older than he was, take a big basket down the ramp, which already, with the tide coming in, was not so steep. And then the screen door of the diner opened and a woman came out, wearing a skirt that went well over her knees, as well as an apron – she could have stepped out of a different century. She had a metal pail in her hand, and as she moved toward the dock, he watched her shoulders, the long back, her thin hips as she moved – she was lovely, the way a sapling might be as the afternoon sun moved over it. A yearning stirred in him that was not sexual but a kind of reaching toward her simplicity of form. He looked away, and his body jumped a little to see an elderly staring through the passenger window, her wrinkly face close, staring straight at him.

Maz Kanata. Holy shit. She looked exactly the same as she had in the classroom in seventh grade, that forthright, high cheek-boned expression; her hair was still dark. He had liked her; not everyone had. He would have waved her away now, or started the car, but the memory of respect held him back. She rapped her hand on the glass, and after hesitating, he leaned and unrolled the window the rest of the way.

“Ben Solo. Hello.”

He nodded.

“You going to invited me to sit in your car?”

His hands made fists in his lap. He started to shake his head. “No, I’m only –“

But she had already let herself in – a tiny woman but her tiny frame makes the air a little too claustrophobic all of a sudden. She hauled a big black handbag across her lap. “What brings you here?” she asked.

He looked out toward the water. The young woman was moving back up from the dock; the seagulls were screeching furiously behind her, beating their large wings and darting down; she’d have been throwing out clamshells, most likely.

“Visiting?” Maz prompted. “From New York City? Isn’t that where you live now?”

“Jesus,” Kylo said quietly. “Does everybody know everything?”

“Oh sure,” she said comfortably. “What else is there to do?”

She had her face turned to him, but he didn’t want to meet her eyes. The wind on the bay seemed to be picking up more. He put his hands into his pockets, so as not to suck on his knuckles.

“Get a lot of tourists now,” Maz said. “Crawling all over the place this time of year.”

He made a sound in his throat, acknowledging not the fact – what did he care? – but that she had spoken to him. He watched the slim woman with the pail, her head tilted down as she went back inside, closing the screen door carefully. “That’s Rey Jones,” Maz said. “Remember her? Rey Niima. She married the older Jones boy. Nice girl. She keeps having miscarriages and it makes her sad.”

Maz sighed, rearranged her feet, pushed the lever – much to Kylo’s surprise – to make herself more comfortable, moving the seat back. “I suspect they’ll get her fixed up one of these days, and then she’ll be pregnant with triples. At least when her husband comes back.”

Kylo took his hands from his pockets, cracked his knuckles. “Rey was nice,” he said. “I had forgotten about Rey.”

“She’s still nice. That’s what I said. What are you doing in New York?”

“Oh.” He raised a hand, saw the reddened marks that spotted them, crossed his arms. “I’m in training. I got my medical degree four years ago.”

“Say, that’s impressive. What kind of doctor are you training to be?”

He looked at the dashboard, couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed the filth of it. There in the sunlight it seemed to be telling her he was a slob, pathetic, not a shred of dignity. He took in a breath and said, “Psychiatry.”

He expected her to say “Ahhh … “ and when she said nothing, he glanced at her, and found that she was giving a simple matter-of-fact nod.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said, squinting back toward the bay. The remark held gratitude for what he felt was her discretion, and it was true, as well for the bay – which he seemed to view from behind a large pane of glass, larger than the windshield – and which did have, he understood, a kind of splendor, the twanging, rocking sailboats, the whipped water, the wild rugosa. How much better to be a fisherman, to spend one’s day in the midst of this. He thought of the PET scans he had studied, always looking for his mother, hands in his pockets, nodding as the radiologists spoke, and sometimes tears twinkling behind his lids – the enlargement of the amygdala, the increase in the white-matter lesions, the severe depletion in the number of glial cells. The brains of the bipolar.

“But I’m not going to be a psychiatrist,” he said.

The wind was really picking up now, making the ramp to the float bob up and down. “I imagine you get a lot of wicky-wackies in that business,” Maz said, adjusting her feet, making a scraping sound as she moved them across the grit of the car floor.

“Some.”

He had gone to medical school thinking he’d become a pediatrician, as his mother had been, but he had been drawn to psychiatry, in spite of his recognition that those who became psychiatrists did so as a result of their own messed-up childhoods, always looking, looking, looking for the answer in the writings of Freud, Horney, Reich, of why they were the anal, narcissistic, self-absorbed freaks that they were, and yet at the same time denying it, of course – what bullshit he had witnessed among his colleagues, his professors! His own interest had become narrowed to victims of torture, but that had also led him to despair, and when he had finally come under the care of Phillip Snoke, Ph.D, M.D., and had told the man his plans to work at The Hague with those whose feet had been beaten raw, whose bodies and minds lay in ruinous disorder, Dr Snoke had said, “What are you, crazy?”

He’d been attracted to crazy. Bazine – what a name – Bazine Netal appeared to be the sanest person he’d ever met. And wasn’t that something? She ought to have been wearing a billboard around her neck: completely bizarre bazine.

“You know the old saying, I’m sure,” Maz said. “Psychiatrists are nutty, cardiologists are hard-hearted – “

He turned to look at her. “And pediatricians?”

“Tyrants,” Maz acknowledged. She gave one shrug to her shoulder.

Kylo nodded. “Yeah,” he said softly.

After a moment, Maz said, “Well, your mother may not have been able to help it.”

He was surprised. His urge to suck on his knuckles was like an agonizing itch, and he ran his hands back and forth over his knees, found the hole in his jeans. “I think my mother was bipolar,” he said. “Never diagnosed, though.”

“I see.” Maz said. “She could’ve been helped today. My father wasn’t bipolar. He was depressed. And he never talked. Maybe they could’ve helped him today.”

Kylo was silent. _And maybe they couldn’t_, he thought.

“My son. He’s got depression.”

Kylo looked at her. Small drops of perspiration had appeared in the pockets beneath her eyes. He saw that she did, in fact, look much older. Of course she wouldn’t look the same as she had back then – the seventh-grade math teacher that kids were scared of. He’d been scared of her, even while liking her.

“What’s he do?” Kylo asked.

“A podiatrist.”

He felt the stain of some sadness make its way from her to him. Gusts of wind were now swooping in all directions, so that the bay looked like a blue and white crazily frosted cake, peaks rising one way, then another. Poplar leaves beside the marina were fluttering upward, their branches all bent to one side.

“I’ve thought of you , Ben Solo,” she said. “I have.”

He closed his eyes. He could hear her shift her weight beside him, heard the gravel again on the rubber mat as her foot scraped over it. He was going to say _I don’t want you thinking about me_, when she said, “I liked your mother. Leia.”

He opened his eyes. Rey Jones had stepped back out of the restaurant; she was walking toward the path in front of the place, and a nervousness touched his chest; it was sheer rock in front there, if he remembered right, a straight drop down. But she would know that.

“I know you did,” Kylo said, turning to the big, intelligent face of Maz Kanata. “She liked you.”

Maz nodded. “Smart. She was a smart woman.”

He wondered how long this would have to go on. And yet it meant something to him, that she had known his mother. In New York no one knew.

“Don’t know if you know this or not, but that was the case with my father.”

“What was?” He frowned, passed his index knuckle briefly through his mouth.

“Suicide.”

He wanted her to leave; it was time for her to leave.

“Are you married?”

He shook his head.

“No, my son isn’t either. Drives my poor husband nuts. Henry wants everyone married, everyone happy. I say, for God’s sake, let him take his time. Up here the pickings can be slim. Down there in New York, I suppose you – “

“I’m not in New York.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not – I’m not in New York anymore.”

He could hear that she was about to ask something; he thought he could almost feel her desire to turn around and look at the backseat, see what was in the car. If she did, he would have to say he needed to go, ask her to leave. He watched from the corner of his eye, but she was still looking straight ahead.

Rey Jones, he saw, had shears in her hand. With her skirt blowing about her, she was standing by the rugosa, cutting some of the white blossoms. He kept his eye on Rey, the choppy bay spread out behind her. “How’d he do it?” He rubbed his hand over his thigh.

“My father? Shot himself.”

The moored sailboats now were heaving their bows high, then swooping back down as though pulled by an angry underwater creature. The white blossoms of the wild rugosa bent, straightened, bent again, the scraggly leaves around them bobbing as though they too were an ocean. He saw Rey Jones step back from them, and give her hand a shake, as though she had been pricked by the thorns.

“No more,” Maz said. “Oh, Mother had such a hard time with that no-note business. She thought the least he could’ve done was leave a note, the way he did if he’d walked to the grocery store. Mother would say, ‘He was always considerate enough to leave me a note when he went anywhere.’ But he hadn’t really gone anywhere. He as there in the kitchen, poor thing.”

“Do these boats ever get loose?” Kylo pictured his own childhood kitchen. He knew that a .22 caliber bullet could travel one mile, go through nine inches of ordinary board. But after the roof of a mouth, the roof of a house – after that, how far did it go?

“Oh, sometimes. Not as much as you’d think, given how fierce these squalls can be. But every so often one does, you know – causes a ruckus. They have to go after it, hope it doesn’t smash up on the rocks.”

“Then the marina gets sued for malpractice?” He said this to divert her.

“I don’t know,” Maz said, “how they handl that kind of thing. Different insurance arrangements, I guess. Acts of negligence or acts of God.”

At the very moment, Kylo became aware of liking the sound of her voice, he felt adrenaline pour through him, the familiar, awful intensity, the indefatigable system that wanted to endure. He squinted hard toward the ocean. Great gray clouds were blowing in, and yet the sun, as though in contest, streamed yellow rays beneath them so that part so fthe water sparkled with frenzied gaiety.

“Unusual for a woman to use a gun,” Maz said, musingly.

He looked at her; she did not return the look, just gazed out at the swirling incoming tide. “Well, my mother was an unusual woman,” he said grimly.

“Yes,” Maz said. “She was.”

When Rey Jones had gotten done with her shift, take her apron off, and gont to hang it in the back room, she had seen through the dusty window the yellow daylilies that grew in the small patch of lawn on the far side of the marina. She pictured them in a jar next to her empty bed. “I’m disappointed too,” her ex-husband had said, the second time adding, “but I know it must feel like it happens just to you.” Her eyes moistened now, remembering this; a great swelling of love once filled her. The lilies would not be missed. No one went to the far side of the marina, partly because the path that ran right in front was so narrow, the drop-off so steep. For insurance purposes the place had recently posted a keep out sign, and there was a even talk of fencing it off before some small child, unwatched, scrambled off into the brush there. But Rey would just snip a few lilies and get going. She found the shears in a drawer and went out to get her bouquet, noticing when she stepped out that Maz Kanata had joined Ben Solo in the car, and it gave her a feeling of safety, having Maz with him. She couldn’t have said why, and didn’t dwell on it. The wind had picked up amazingly. She’d hurry and get her flowers, wrap them in a wet paper towel, and stop off by Old Kenobi’s on the way home. She bent over the rugosa bushes first, thinking what a sweet combination the yellow and white would be, but they were alive in the wind and her fingers were pricked. She turned to start along the path to where the lilies were.

Kylo said, “Well, it was nice seeing you, Mrs Kanata.” He glanced at her with a nod meant to signal a goodbye. It was bad luck that she’d encountered him, but he could not be responsible for that. He had felt responsibility about Dr Snoke, whom Kylo had genuinely come to love, but even that had receded as he driven up the turnpike.

Maz Kanata was taking a Kleenex from her big black bag. She touched it to her forehead, her hairline, didn’t look at Kylo. She said, “I wish I hadn’t passed those genes on to him.”

Kylo gave the slightest roll of his eyes. The question of genes, DNA, RNA, chromosome 6, the dopamine, serotonin crap; he had lost interest in all that. In fact, it angered him the way a betrayal might. “We are on the edge of understanding the essence of how the mind works in a molecular way,” a noted academic lead had said at a lecture last year. The dawning of a new age.

There was always a new age dawning.

“Not that the kid didn’t get a few wicky-wacky genes from Henry’s side. God knows. His mother was a complete nut, you know. Horrid.’

“Whose mother?”

“Henry’s. My husband’s. I guess you’re not supposed to say ‘nut’ these days, are you?” She looked over at him. He’d been about to start with his wrist again, but he put his hands back into his lap.

Please go, he thought.

“But she had three breakdowns and shock treatments. Doesn’t that qualify?”

He shrugged.

“Well, she was wired funny. I guess I can at least say that.”

Nuts was when you took a razor blade and cut long strips into your torso. Your thighs, your arms. Ballistically bizarre Bazine. That was nuts. The first night together in the dark he had felt the lines. “I fell,” she had whispered. He had pictured living with her. Art on the wall, light shining through a bedroom window. Friends at Thanksgiving, a Christmas tree because Bazine would want one. Not that she showed affinity to celebrations.

“The girl is nothing but trouble,” Dr Snoke had said.

It was not Dr Snoke’s place to say such a thing. But she had been nothing but trouble: loving and tender one minute, furious the next. The business of cutting herself – it had made him crazy. Crazy breeds crazy. And then she had left, because that’s what Bazine did – left people and everything else. Off to somewhere new with her obsessions. Cartwheeling from one thing to the next.

“Everyone suffers through a bad love affair,” Dr Snoke had said.

That – actually – was just not true. Kylo knew people who had not suffered through a bad love affair. Not many, perhaps, but a few. Maz Kanata blew her nose.

“Your son,” Kylo said suddenly. “He’s still able to practice?”

“What do you mean?”

“With his depression? He still goes to work everyday?”

“Oh, sure.”

It was always sad, the way the world was going. And always a new age dawning.

“Where’d you go after here? Seattle? Is that what I remember? Your father took a job there?

Kylo nodded.

“I suppose he wanted to get as far away from her as possible. Time and distance, they always say. I don’t know as that’s true.”

To get the conversation over with, Kylo said, dully, “My father died last year of liver cancer. He never remarried. And I never saw much of him once I left.”

All the degrees Kylo had acquired, the colelges and universities he had gone to with the fellowships and scholarships he had received, his father had never showed up. But every town had been promising. Every place at first had said, Here you go – You can live here. You can _rest_ here. You can fit.

But as with them all, the same hopeful differences – the tall, hot white glassed buildings of Seattle; the tree-lined streets of Hyde Park in Chicago, with the wooden stairs behind each apartment (he had loved those especially); the neighbourhoods of West Hartford, where it looked like a storybook, the houses , the perfect lawns – they all became places that sooner or later, one way or another, assured him that he didn’t, in fact, fit.

When he got his medical degree from Chicago, attending the ceremony only because of one of his teachers – a kind woman, who had said it would sadden her to have him not there – he sat beneath the full sun, listening to the president of the university say, in his final words to them, “ To love and be loved is the most important thing in life,” causing Kylo to feel an inward fear that grew and spread through him, as though his very soul were tightening. But what a thing to say – the man in his venerable robe, white hair, grandfatherly face – he must’ve had no idea those words could cause such an exacerbation of the silent dread in Kylo. Even Freud had said, “We must love or we grow ill.” They were spelling it out for him. Every billboard, movie, magazine cover, television ad – it all spelled it out for him: We belong to the world of family and love. And you don’t.

New York, the most recent, had held the largest hopes. The subways filled with such a variety of dull colors and edgy-looking people; it relaxed him, the different clothes, the shopping bags, people sleeping or reading or nodding their heads to some earphoned tune; he had loved the subways, and for a while the activities of the hospitals. But his affair with Bazine, and the end of it, had caused him to recoil from the palce, so that the streets now seemed crowded and tiresome – all the same. Dr Snoke he loved, but that was it – everyone else had become tiresome, and he had thought more and more how provincial New Yorkers were, and how they didn’t know it.

What he began to want was to see his childhood house – a house he believed, even as he sat in his car now, that he had never once been happy in. And yet, oddly, the fact of its unhappiness seemed to have a hold on him with the sweetness of a remembered love affair. For Kylo had some memories of sweet, brief love affairs – so different from the long-drawn-out mess with Bazine – and none measured up to the inner desire, the _longing_ he felt for that place. That house where the sweatshirts and woolen jackets stank like moist salt and musty wood – the smell made him sick, as did the smell of a wood fire, which his father had sometimes made in the fireplace, poking at it in a distracted way. Kylo thought he must be the only person in the country who hated the smell of wood fire. But the house, the trees tangled with the woodbine, the surprise of a lady’s slipper in the midst of pine needles, the open leaves of the wild lilies of the valley – he missed it.

He missed his mother.

_I’ve made an awful pilgrimage… I’ve come back for more…_ Kylo wished, as he often did, that he had known the poet John Berryman.

Maz starts to recall an old childhood memory of playing hide and seek with her father. Kylo didn’t know what to say to this. He squeezed his hands in as tiny a gesture as possible, looking down at the steering wheel. He felt her presence, and imagined – fleetingly – that a racoon sat next to him, one that wanted to be a member of the human kingdom, as she finished speaking.

“That’s a nice story,” he said.

He thought of the boy cleaning the fish, how his father had held his hand out to him. He thought again of Jerry Berryman. _Save us from shotguns and fathers’ suicides … Mercy! … do not pull the trigger or all my life I’ll suffer from your anger …_ He wondered if Maz Kanata, being a math teacher, knew much poetry.

“Look how the wind’s picked up,” she said. “Always kind of exciting, long as you don’t have a wharf that floats away, like ours used to do. Henry’d be down on those rocks with the waves – Oh, God what a fracas it was.”

Again, Kylo found himself liking the sound of her voice. Through the windshield he saw the waves coming in higher now, hitting the ledge in front of the marina hard enough to send a spray far into the air, the spray then falling back languidly, the drops sifting through the shards of sunlight that still cracked its way between the dark clouds. The inside of his head began to feel as choppy as the surf before him. Don’t go, his mind said to Maz. Don’t go.

But this turbulence in him was torture. He though how yesterday morning, in New York, as he’d walked to his car, he had for one moment not seen it. And there was that prick of fear, because he’d had it all planned and wrapped up, and where was the car? But there it was, right there, the old Subaru wagon, and then he knew what he’d felt had been hope. Hope was a cancer inside him. He didn’t want it; he did not want it. He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope springing up within him any longer. That awful story of the man who jumped – and survived – walking back and forth for an hour on the Golden Gate Bridge, weeping, saying that had anyone stopped to ask why he was weeping, he wouldn’t have jumped.

“Mrs Kanata, you have to – “

But she was leaning forward, squinting through the windshield. “Wait, what in the _hell_ – “ And moving faster than he would have thought possible, she was out of the car, the door left open, and had gone to the front of the marina, her black bag left on the grass. For a moment she disappeared, then reappeared, waving her arms, shouting, though he couldn’t hear what she was saying.

He stepped from the car, and was surprised by the force of the wind that whipped through his shirt. Maz was shouting, “Hurry up! Hurry!” He ran to where she was and looked down into the water, the tide higher than he’d have thought. Maz pointed with a repeated thrust of her arm, and he saw the head of Rey Jones rise briefly above the choppy water, like a seal’s head, her hair wet and darkened, and then she disappeared again, her skirt swirling with the swirling dark ropes of seaweed.

Kylo turned, so that as he slid down the high sheet of rock, his arms were spread as though to hug it, but there was nothing to hug, just the flat scraping against his chest, ripping his clothes, his skin, his cheek, and then the cold water rose over him. It stunned him, how cold the water was, as though he’d been dropped into a huge test tube containing a pernicious chemical eating at his skin. His foot hit something steady in the massive swooshing of the water; he turned and saw her reaching for him, her eyes open, her skirt swirled around her waist; her fingers reached for him, missed, reached for him again, and he got hold of her. The water receded for a moment, and as a wave came back to cover them, he pulled her hard, and her grip on him was so tight he would have thought it possible with her thin arms that she could hold anything as tightly as she held him.

Again the water rose, they both took a breath; again they were submerged and his leg hooked over something, an old pipe; unmoving. The next time, they both reached their heads high as the water rushed back, another breath taken. He heard Maz yelling from above. He couldn’t hear the words, but he understood that help was coming. He had only to keep Rey from fallin away, and as they went again beneath the swirling, sucking water, he strengthened his grip on her arm to let her know: He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing through each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the old wrinkly woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean – oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked what you read, please leave your mark!


End file.
